Thursday, July 16, 2015

In her new book The
Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman
Ecologies (2014, NYU Press), Rachel C. Lee, Professor of English
and Gender Studies and Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of
Women, examines the interstices of embodiment, governmentality, and racial
formation through the conceptual frameworks of biopolitics and biosociality.The central question Lee’s text takes up is:
if race has been settled not as biological fact, but rather as a legal or
social construction, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers
continue to scrutinize their body parts?To this end, Lee examines novels, performance, poetry, and new media, such
as Cheng-Chieh Yu’s dance theater, Margaret Cho’s stand-up comedy, and Amitav
Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome.Lee’s
innovative approach assigns each chapter to body parts that provide the
catalyst for her readings and inform the somatic structure of the book’s form
and content; effectively assembling the cadaver
exquis promised in the title.

Lee analyzes the fragmentation of human bodies, divisible
corporeality, and manipulable biologies as they appear in Asian American cultural
and literary production to forge a symbiont relationship between Asian American
Studies and Science and Technology Studies. She argues, “Asian Americanist critique and
certain strains of bioethics have made ethical, political, and moral claims
vis-à-vis these body parts; and they have done so through a distinctive
rhetorical move that putatively returns the extracted body part to the violated
racialized whole—a move that naturalizes a prior state of organic intactness
and individuality to that racialized body” (7). Pushing the boundaries of
bioscientific and humanistic approaches, Lee queries the preservation of
organic, whole structures to consider the utility of fragmented, distributed
parts and patterns of circulation for thinking embodiment. In the vagina and GI
tract of Lee’s textual body, for example, Margaret Cho’s Cho Revolution is read alongside consumption, militarism, peristalsis,
and reproductive politics in order to highlight the ways in which Asian
Americans’ reflections on body parts demonstrate the body as both a site of
governmentality and evidence of the organism’s capacity to express biopolitical
agency.

Challenging the racialized body, Lee’s text
offers generative insights for critical race, femiqueer, and performance
studies. Lee’s nuanced attention to the divergent
scales of embodiment in her stunning and original readings of Asian American
cultural production indicate the exigency of rethinking the human organism in
light of new biotechnological developments and biosocial arrangements.

--Angela Robinson

Angela Robinson is a graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA.